Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration and Department of Transportation requires periodic inspection of the vehicular brakes on all commercial vehicles (in particular, both pre- and post-transportation trip). Conventional practice of confirming that a vehicular brake system is operational is for one person to depress the brake pedal in the cabin of the vehicle while another person, standing behind the vehicle, verifies that the brake lights are operational and that air pressure is at appropriate level within the brake system. While this approach is widely used, it requires the presence of two people. In practice, however, there is often only a single driver going on a road-trip. A single person finds it rather difficult to check the performance of the brakes.
As an “on-the-spot” solution, many drivers use some sort of an irregular, circumstantial article (such as a brick or a stick, for example) that they could accommodate on the brake pedal to depress it while stepping out of the vehicle to see whether the brakes lights are lit. (Validation of the operability of the brake system on some vehicles also often includes a verification that the air-pressure system engaging the brakes maintains the appropriate pressure, and that no air-leaks are present. In practice, this is done “by ear”, when a driver listens to the noisy air-leaks outside of the vehicle while the brake pedal is depressed.) In practice, such “on-the-spot” solution is neither optimal nor versatile because, on one hand, an irregular article cannot be reliably fastened to and depress the brake pedal for a time period necessary to conclude the inspection and, on the other hand, the same irregular article cannot be used in every vehicle due to difference in dimensions of vehicular cabins and/or different resistance of different brake pedals. In particular, solutions offering depressing a brake pedal by “wedging” an elongated element such as a stick, tube, or rod between either the driver's seat and the brake pedal or a dash board and the brake pedal do not take into account the design of the vehicular cabin. Indeed, it is well known the fact that there exists no uniformity in design of either the vehicular seats or dash boards, which makes it problematic to accommodate different distances between the seat/board and brake pedal. For example, dash boards are universally different from model to model of a vehicle. Moreover, some vehicles are lacking a dash-board surface that could provide for similar accommodation. As far as using a driver seat is concerned, not only is it soft but, in practice, many driver seats are worn out or torn apart and simply do not provide a solid reference surface for entrapping or fixing one of the ends of a wedging element.
In another approach to solve the problem, an external vehicular mirror may be affixed to a back portion of the vehicle and oriented to make a rear brake light visible to the driver sitting in the cabin. This solution, of course, requires a mirror that is appropriately attached and fully operational at the time of inspection. More often than desired, however, such protruding beyond the extend of the vehicle mirror is out of working order, for example broken off. There is a need, therefore, in a universal tool and method that secures or fixes a depressed position of the brake pedal thereby facilitating the inspection, by a single person (driver), of a brake system of any vehicle and that does not depend on availability of auxiliary components located externally to the vehicle.